Everyday Beans Podcast - Mostly About Coffee and Other Stuff

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Finer has become the go-to answer to everything in coffee lately, especially for light roast, and it bugs me, partly because it's right. A couple of months ago, experimenting with light roasts, every step finer made the coffee more interesting, and I started tasting parts of the acidity I'd never gotten from the coarser grind. Even a dark roast can take a finer grind if you use a faster paper filter. But I'm a medium to dark roast person, and those coffees are often more expressive on the coarser side. Squeeze every bit out of them and they lose their character. Then the OXO Rapid Brewer kept leaking on me until somebody told me to go finer, a 2 on the Fellow Ode, and it barely leaked and the coffee was tasty.
So finer works. My problem is when it's the only answer. Go finer and you reach for a faster filter, then a Melodrip or a booster, then hotter water, and after a while different coffees can start tasting the same. I'm trying to understand the logic: is it the tasting notes on the bag, or a bit of a flex, one step closer to espresso? I know why I pull the levers I pull, and I go finer when the brewer needs it or when I'm bored and want to see if it moves the needle. Know why you're using your tools. And tell me: do you crave the fineness of your coffee?
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I walked away from my wife's dark roast, and years later I've come to realize why it's my preference now. This one's about the word fight. I started on her dark roast in a Mr. Coffee, went down the origins and roast degrees rabbit hole, landed on light roast and a Hario V60, and geeked out on acidity for years. Then, around four years ago, the coffees started to get flat. I roasted every profile I could think of, tried ratios, blamed my tap water, my filters and my brewer, and wondered if I was falling out of love with coffee. A medium roast opened it back up. Now I'm in a dark roast phase, and what still wakes me up is a washed African or Colombian where the acidity comes in just enough and then it gets sweet again.
If a coffee doesn't taste the way it used to, it could be old beans, a roaster who tried a different profile, a bad crop, your water, or a slow paper filter. More than anything, it could be you fighting your own palate, and letting people who aren't in the room tell you how to enjoy coffee. So try a different coffee: a dark roast from the store, a medium roast that's a little more developed. Ask yourself why you like it or don't, and write it down. Your window shifts, the same way steak, Brussels sprouts and brisket have for me. Let your palate talk to you. It won't lie to you.
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In this episode, I tackle a question that every coffee brewer has faced at some point — why doesn't following someone else's recipe actually work? I break down the core reason: recipes are personal. They're built around the creator's palate, their water chemistry, their preferred roast levels, and their brewing habits — none of which are fully disclosed when they hand you a step-by-step guide. I share how I spent a long time blindly following recipes, stripping myself of my own preferences in pursuit of someone else's "perfect cup," and why that approach was setting me up to fail every single time.
I draw a comparison to the world of cooking, referencing how understanding foundational flavor principles — rather than memorizing recipes — is what actually empowers you in the kitchen. Coffee is no different. I encourage listeners to stop outsourcing their coffee experience to someone else and start asking the real questions: What water temperature brings out the flavors I enjoy? Does my brewer shape how acidic my cup tastes? What roast profile actually matches my palate? By the end of this episode, you'll walk away understanding why your recipe keeps falling short — and more importantly, what you should be doing instead to brew a cup of coffee that's genuinely yours.
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In this episode I dig into a distinction I think most coffee content skips right over: the difference between being taught coffee and actually learning it. I can hand you a recipe, but I can't hand you the palate that knows when to break it. I walk through a recent cup, a dark roasted Nicaraguan that kept lingering with a fruity, tannin-heavy finish I personally don't enjoy. My palate told me it was over-extracted before I ever touched a refractometer, and when I ran the TDS for fun it came back right in range. The point isn't the number. The point is that it took me years of brewing to trust what my own mouth was telling me, and no recipe written by someone else's palate was ever going to get me there on its own.
I also open up about my own path, the years I spent using my V60 almost blindly, running the same recipe and only nudging the temperature, wondering if the bright, acidic light roasts I kept brewing were what I was "supposed" to like. I talk about going darker against the voices telling me I was doing it wrong, discovering more sweetness, falling for African dark roasts, and learning what flat-bottom drippers, different filters, and different waters actually did to my cup. If you've ever followed a recipe to the letter and felt frustrated that your cup didn't match the promise, this one is for you. You'll learn why getting taught is genuinely useful for speeding up the journey, why it can never be the finish line, and how to start tailoring coffee to your own taste the same way you already doctor a recipe in the kitchen. You can't be taught coffee. You can learn it, and that part is up to you.
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I can't hand you my water, and nobody else can either. My tap tested at 273 ppm the other day. Yours might be 150, or 100 if you're lucky, and even then neither of us knows what minerals are actually in it. So when you go looking online for the right water, you get one opinion, then another, then another, and you end up more confused than when you started. What water did they start with? What kind of coffee do they like? Are they trying to sell you something?
Here's where I've landed. Pick one voice you trust, understand why they do what they do, and start with the water you already have. A $10 TDS meter will open your eyes. Then let your palate take over, the same way mine pulled me toward more developed coffees while everyone around me was chasing light roasts. I walk through my own path, from tap to Third Wave Water to blending my own sweet and acidic profiles, and why once water's figured out, that's where the work gets fun. Let me know what you think.
Support the show
Go deeper than the episode, in the newsletter: https://itsmellsbetterthanittaste.com

For tips, tricks and still trying to figure it out: https://www.youtube.com/@everyday-beans

For good tasty coffee, check us out at: everydaybeans.com